A security company was able to work with a major unnamed university in the northeast to stop an attack that was initially thought to originate from students to disrupt online testing. It turned out to come from another university. Netscout Systems shared some details about the attack, which hit the university’s online test platforms. Netscout produces programs that provide visibility into application and network performance.
According to Netscout experts, the attack vectors used weren’t especially innovative, but the traffic was localized to sources geographically close to the university. And the timing of the security incidents coincided with what the company referred to as “typical student cyber activities.”
The process of identifying and diagnosing the problem was quick, the company noted. It took Netscout’s security operations center a couple of hours to identify the pattern and communicate that information to the university’s IT department. From there the institution’s IT organization examined its own traffic patterns. The attack was eventually traced back to a campus proxy run at another university.